Arab-Americans Seek Greater Political Influence

By WAYNE KING, Special to the New York Times

Published: August 3, 1987

WASHINGTON, Aug. 2—
After decades of largely abstaining from organized political activity, Arab-Americans are beginning to build a grass-roots political organization and to seek a greater voice in foreign policy.

A major goal of the organizing effort, according to one of its chief architects, James J. Zogby, executive director of the Arab American Institute, is to stir debate on the Middle East, a topic he maintains is dominated by pro-Israel groups. He said some 11,000 Arab-Americans in major cities had signed pledge cards in the last few months, promising to register to vote, to speak out on issues like ''Palestinian rights and peace in Lebanon,'' to support Arab-Americans as delegates to the conventions of both major political parties and to assist Arab-Americans in running for local office.

Although there are more than two million Arab-Americans in the United States, they have not been a significant political factor. Mr. Zogby said this was chiefly because of ''a village identity'' - a tendency of Arab immigrants to identify first with the village they came from, then with their country and finally, if at all, as Arabs.

Mr. Zogby said the organizing was focused in nine areas where there are large concentrations of Arab-Americans: Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and eastern Ohio, in the Cleveland-Youngstown area. Forgoing PAC's

Mr. Zogby said Arab-Americans would not form a political action committee dedicated to pressing pro-Arab aims through political contributions -a war the fledgling Arab-American community would be unlikely to win.

''We will not have a PAC,'' he said. ''Abuse of the PAC system by the Israel lobby is a serious impediment to debate on the Mideast. We have an absence of debate because that silence has been bought by some $7 million in PAC contributions from Israel PAC's. The Israel PAC's have silenced democratic debate.''

Instead, he said, the Arab-American effort will involve organizing at the grass-roots level and challenging candidates on Mideast issues.

Mr. Zogby, a son of Lebanese immigrants who holds a doctoral degree in Eastern studies, was interviewed recently by telephone from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he has been organizing that city's Arab-American community, which he said numbered some 3,000.

The organizing effort there and in Des Moines is aimed chiefly at recruiting Arab-Americans to take part in the Presidential caucuses Feb. 8. But Mr. Zogby said he was also planning a series of ''issue forums'' on the Middle East. ''We may bring over people from the Mideast itself,'' he said. Uncertainty About Impact

Because the Arab-American organizing effort is new, no one is quite sure how effective it will ultimately be. In Iowa, for example, where Mr. Zogby said a substantial organizing effort was under way in Cedar Rapids, the Democratic Party spokesman, Phil Roeder, said he was unaware of the effort and unsure of its impact.

Mr. Zogby, a Democrat who was a deputy director of Jesse Jackson's Presidential campaign in 1984, and George Salem, a Republican who directed the drive for ethnic-group support in the Reagan-Bush campaign of 1984, founded the Arab American Institute two years ago specifically as a political organizing tool.

Mr. Zogby previously was the director of the American Arab Antidiscrimination Committee, founded by former Senator James G. Abourezk of South Dakota to defend the civil rights of Arab-Americans and counter ''negative stereotyping'' of Arab culture. Mr. Abourezk says the group now has 16,000 members.

Although his committee concentrates on combating defamation of the Arab image in the United States, Mr. Abourezk said it also urged political participation. ''I've spent the last seven years, since the committee was founded, trying to educate our members on how to move politically,'' he said. Abourezk Recalls Difficulty

But such participation is fraught with difficulty, concedes Mr. Abourezk, who in 1978 declined to run for re-election after one term in the Senate. As a longtime champion of Arab and Arab-American causes, he has sometimes stirred animosities, as when he signed on in 1979 as the American lawyer for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's revolutionary Islamic Government amid the Iran hostage crisis.